(The Catholic Thing) — Dennis Quaid and Penelope Ann Miller imitate Ronald and Nancy Reagan in a new movie about the life of America’s 40th president. As director Sean McNamara and screenwriter Howard Klausner would have us believe, that life was mostly about anti-communism.

No one will doubt that Mr. Reagan was opposed to communism, but one might have hoped a 2:21 movie might go just a little deeper into the complexities of the man’s life than just his dream of toppling the Evil Empire. That and his love for Nancy.

Reactions to the film have been interesting. Audiences have been generally enthusiastic; critics have not. No need to belabor the obvious: those who buy tickets for this film are likely centrist-conservative fans of the late president, and newspaper and television critics are steadfastly left-liberal and prefer that none of the Reagan mystique should surround the current Republican presidential nominee.

(A personal disclosure: Ronald Reagan sent a handwritten note to me in 1990 praising a column I’d written in National Review opposing the legalization of marijuana. Mrs. Reagan was famous for promoting the phrase “Just say, ‘No’” about drug use. Mr. Reagan is the president I admire most after Washington and Lincoln. Also, I’m a registered Republican.)

There’s a lot about Reagan’s life missing from the film. I acknowledge, of course, that every biographical film is defined as much by what’s left out as by what’s put in, and to cover the sweep of Reagan’s life and presidency would require a miniseries.

Reagan’s friendship with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (played by Lesley-Anne Down) and – less a friendship and more an entente – between the two of them and Mikhail Gorbachev (Olek Krupa in the film’s best performance) play out as they should.

But the one person who should have been included in the story is all but left out.

The film begins with (and later circles back to) the attempted assassination of Reagan in March of 1981. We get the memorable quips: when Nancy rushes to the hospital and Ronnie tells her, “Honey, I forgot to duck,” and as the surgeons are about to operate, Reagan says, “Please tell me you’re Republicans.”

And we see the memorable people who played key roles in the Reagan administration and even get a bit of the story of the genesis of the great speech he gave at the Brandenburg Gate – the line many of his closest advisors begged him not to use about the Berlin Wall, the great symbol of Soviet communist oppression. But Reagan did say, passionately: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

If you didn’t know, as young audiences may not, that part of what emboldened the president to rhetorically (and not just diplomatically and militarily) confront the Soviets was not so much Maggie Thatcher’s urging, as it was the example of Pope John Paul II.

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And he’s the movie’s missing person.

There’s a brief scene in which the assassination attempt on the pope is mentioned and another in which Papa Wojtyła’s image appears, but that’s it. No actor portrays him.

Given the role St. John Paul the Great played in the events that led to the downfall of the Soviet Union and the bond he formed with President Reagan, this is surprising.

And it’s downright astonishing, given that the film is based on Paul Kengor’s book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. Professor Kengor is also the author (with Robert Orlando) of The Divine Plan: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Dramatic End of the Cold War and their documentary of the same title.

The movie’s opening sequence even uses the words “divine plan” to frame its point of view about Reagan’s life and achievements.

At the Reagan complex in California within days of one and the other, the Reagan film had its premiere as the Reagan Presidential Library opened an exhibit called “The Pope and the President” to “share the story of President Reagan and Pope John Paul II’s collaboration, friendship and legacies.”

As Notre Dame professor Daniel Philpott explained the exhibit to The Catholic Herald:

It was a kinship between two souls who shared the same moral vision. Unlike people who surrounded them, both on the Right and the Left, each of them believed that Communism in the Eastern Bloc could come to an end – not sustained through conflict resolution methods, not defeated through war, but rather transformed peacefully.

Reagan might have succeeded in its portrait of Ronald Wilson Reagan as a Protestant saint had it also included scenes between him and an actual saint. It might have but probably wouldn’t have, because the movie is simply a long made-for-TV failure that substitutes a kind of cinematic name-dropping for character development and a kind of leaden documentary style for storytelling.

And it has a simply bizarre structural conceit. A fictional former KGB agent, Viktor Petrovich (Jon Voight) is tasked with explaining to a promising young Russian politician (Alexey Sparrow) how it is the U.S.S.R. came crashing down. You can guess the answer: Ronald Reagan.

To the extent that the case might be made, it would have to include more substantive visual and intellectual evidence of the Reagan Revolution – a phrase that described American economic policy and boosted the Western economy after the malaise of the Carter years. And it might have been good to note the decline of the Soviet economy and the dissent against Soviet rule in the so-called satellites – not least in Poland.

Professor Kengor describes the moment the “light bulb” went on for Reagan when he saw TV footage of John Paul II in Poland:

‘That’s it!’ Reagan had shouted at his television as he and close aide Richard Allen watched the remarkable news footage of the son of Poland’s visit to Warsaw. ‘The Pope is the key! The Pope is the key!’ Reagan told Allen, a Catholic, that he needed to win the presidency and they needed to reach out to this new Polish pope and [the] Vatican and ‘make them an ally.’

As I say, a film is defined as much by what’s left out as by what’s included.

Reprinted with permission from The Catholic Thing.